Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a few questions on this. First, talk to me about your freemium strategy. What did you offer for free and what did you offer for premium? Christian Vanek: What we offer for free now is probably too much. That comes back down to the cultural problems in my organization. I tend

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that your main competitive strategy in winning accounts that would use your software for their sales enhancement process was to find them through different channels where you were not facing competitors? Guy Mucklow: Largely. I guess, it was also about the way in which we sold. We had a major focus on delivering

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you that you rank in the first three search results for survey software. As you said, there is lots of competitors. Why do people buy your software over your competitors? What is the key positioning point that you win on? Christian Vanek: We serve two markets. The first market is definitely

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about how you sell. Whom were you selling to? What was the sales decision making cycle? Guy Mucklow: Our main target audiences were e-commerce businesses. Another really important learning and a key theme that underlines and underpins our whole business is about choosing your routes to market very carefully. Most of our

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was about to ask you about the commercial terms that you negotiated with the company that was giving you all this input about what to build. How did you structure the terms? Christian Vanek: The terms were very simple. It was a gentleman’s agreement to be honest and we still are upholding

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the focus? What drove the process of determining where you were going to focus? Guy Mucklow: One of the things that we had done in trying to get PCA off the ground was to look at a piece of technology, which actually is very prevalent in the UK, around capturing data

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Bootstrapping to $13 Million with Freemium and Free Trials: SurveyGizmo CEO Christian Vanek (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at this? Christian Vanek: I stayed at it for two and a half years before I ran out of money. Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2001? Christian Vanek: Yes. Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Bootstrapping to $20 Million From London: Guy Mucklow, CEO of PCA Predict (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you burn the $200,000 on? Guy Mucklow: Partly salaries and technology. Though we were building a lot of stuff ourselves, we needed infrastructure to support the service we were building. If you look back on those times, you think, “Why on earth did I do that?” We spent $50,000 on just building

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